Post #60: Goethe’s Higher Beings

28 August 2023

Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut!

(An Interpretation)

Let man be noble, ever-helpful, and good!

For that alone sets him apart

From all other creatures we know.

Hail those higher beings

of whom we can have no knowledge, only intimations!

Let man resemble them

And teach us to believe in them by his example.

Man alone is capable of the impossible:

Only he can heal and redeem

Binding to good purpose what is confused and scattered.

Let the noble man be ever-helpful and good!

Let him strive tirelessly for all that is useful and right

And be our image of those higher beings!

based on “Das Göttliche” (The Divine)

by J. W. von Goethe, 1783

It is a widespread sentiment among the sophisticated that we must be “realists” about the world, and that being so requires a good dose of Machiavellianism as it is commonly understood. Being loving and kind, polite and honest, considerate and thoughtful, can appear merely dull and outdated by contrast. “Gone are the days of the honorable gentleman,” I’ve heard it said recently, and by a good friend. For being nice and caring, which is good only for naïfs and suckers, apparently—at least when the going gets tough, especially around matters of survival and procreation—we should substitute a shrewd indifference.

I understand where this is coming from. I have read my Machiavelli quite closely (you will find an article about the infamous Florentine on my Academia page, if you are curious), and I can acknowledge without flinching or getting unduly sanctimonious the infamous passages about how it is better (at least safer) to be feared than loved, or how, in the world as we know it, it is by no means enough to take one’s stand on goodness, honesty, and faithfulness alone, but that one must also know how to be bad in the manner of a fox (or in the lingo of the Roman church, a serpent: Machiavelli had much respect for ruthless churchmen, a theme that is central to my article). There is much to say about the nuances of what Machiavelli was arguing for and against, as opposed to the caricature he has become in the public mind, but that is in the article (especially section IV), readily available for anyone who wishes to look into the matter more closely.

A blind idealism, going only by how one would like the world to look rather than what it turns out to be upon dispassionate analysis, is neither wise nor prudent, and it is not particularly Buddhist either, as I keep stressing when I invoke the principle of yatha-bhuta. Reality must be faced as it is, not as one would like to be. What bothers me is the notion that indifference should somehow trump loving-kindness and consideration almost as a matter of course—and especially the possibility that this kind of thinking might get equated with detachment in the sense that I have been talking about. It is true that a dispassionate look at what things are really like can be more detached than a perspective that takes itself to be kind and caring while it is in fact skewed in all kinds of ways by one’s desires and self-serving filters, both crude and subtle. The trouble is that the indifferent perspective is no less skewed and reveals itself, often enough, as mere shorthand for not caring enough.

I am neither so gullible nor so devious as to pretend that the world of politics and diplomacy, or that of human attraction and dating, or the whole big evolutionary picture as shaped by the cruel imperatives of struggling for genetic survival, is governed by Marquess of Queensberry Rules. To step into the ring of life is to invite getting hurt, and to expect only permissible, fair-minded moves and punches would be to expose oneself to even greater harm than is anyway inevitable. But this admission it is still a very far cry from the hideous notion that all is fair in love and war, from which, in turn, it is not a very big step to the even more egregious idea that all is fair so long as you can pull it off and get away with it.

It is true that we must face, throughout our lives, many harsh and bitter truths that we cannot just evade or brush off. Denial or wishful thinking does not help. But it is equally true that by our reactions and responses to these realities, we either contribute to reinforcing them, or else we do our part to change them, and be it ever so slightly. However thin the red line may appear, everything depends on it holding, and the true measure of our worldly human wisdom consists precisely in how skillfully we draw it and keep our balance between sensible acquiescence and necessary resistance.

“So you mean to uphold the letter of the law, sir, no matter the cost?” Colonel Nicholson gets challenged in The Bridge over the River Kwai.

“Without law, there is no civilization,” Nicholson answers.

“But sir, that’s just my point; there is no civilization here.”

“Then we shall have an opportunity to introduce it.”

Goethe was no Colonel Nicholson; he became famous, when he was only in his mid-twenties, with a proto-Romantic novel about the Sorrows of Young Werther that caused a sensation throughout Europe in the 1770s. His young hero, alas, offered nearly a point-by-point illustration of how a man ought under no circumstances to handle his amorous affairs, even before he demonstrated even more pitiably how not to bungle one’s suicide. Nor was the author who gave him life a great deal more success in matters of the heart. Cautionary tales, I admit, in which the world of letters abounds.

The deeper issue, however, is not whether it is a good idea to learn the ways of love from novels, or whether one’s favorite fictional hero is a reliable guide to real life in any respect (movies are even worse than books). It is the profound sentiment at the heart of Goethe‘s poem, which does not spell out any specific courses of action, but calls for a certain spirit in doing them. Nor does the nobility that Goethe yearned for run counter to skillful means; on the contrary, it requires and thrives on them. To say of someone that he does something “like an angel” is not to accuse him of having his head too much in the clouds, or his heart too much on his sleeve; it is an expression of deep approbation and admiration for someone’s mastery.

The way I understand Goethe’s noble man is as an antidote, above all else, to the shrug of indifference that acts as if the distinction between the good and the bad, the higher and the lower, the noble and the base, mattered little, or not at all. Whether that wretched stance is a symptom of our times or a universal feature of the human condition, I dare not say. All know is that these callow shrugs send cold shivers down my spine. I concede that as a seductive strategy (suggesting the high mating value of someone in no rush to jump at every slight opportunity, etc.) such an attitude may be quite effective, but it still looks like the void to me, the banality of evil in its milder forms. (If that sounds like an overheated connection to make, take a look at what Eli Wiesel has to say about the perils of indifference.)

“Aloof” may sound worse to some, but not to me, since it need not imply an uncaring outlook, only a higher vantage point from which things can be seen and understood more clearly and dispassionately. Angels are aloof, not tied down to the petty narrowness of an entrenched position; they soar beyond our earthly limitations, but they are more reliably loving than we, never uncaring or indifferent, unless they are the fallen kind and have lost their title and become devils and demons. As in my discussion of Heaven and Hell (#56), I do not mean for these terms to be understood too literally; such “higher beings,” for me as for Goethe, are personifications of powers that we cannot understand in our ordinary way, but of which we can catch glimpses and intimations. As Goethe has it, we make their existence credible when we are at our best, not by yapping about them. I couldn’t agree more.

What use preaching in the storm—and in the world at large, when are the gales ever not blowing, even if one may get some moments of respite in one’s little corner now and then? The wind-swept, tempest-tossed sea is no place for Sunday school lessons, but for desperate prayers and life-rafts, for holding to one’s mantra no matter how fiercely the waves may rage:

Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut!

(Let man be noble, ever-helpful, and good!)

Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut!

Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut!